[Fedora-xen] Guest Image File Size

[John Summerfield]

Markus Armbruster wrote:
> Sadique Puthen <sputhenp at redhat.com> writes:
> 
>> Aaron Metzger wrote:
>>> virt-install has a checkbox which suggests that you can avoid
>>> preallocating the entire guest image size -- that the guest image
>>> file will grow on demand.
>>>
>>> Does this work for Xen or is it only supported for KVM and the QEMU
>>> COW files?
>> yes, this works fine on xen.
> 
> Until you run out of space in the filesystem containing the image
> file!  Then the guest can't write any blocks that were previously left
> out of the image file, which leads to massive guest filesystem
> corruption and data loss.
> 
> I use sparse image files all the time.  But only for the throw-away
> domains I create for testing.

I thought I read that ext3 journals save the day. Whether they always 
save it, "man mke2fs" for journal options. Using a device that _is not_ 
sparse, it seems to me, must be safe.


-- 

Cheers
John

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